To obtain access to services, particularly where offered over the Internet, it is generally required for a user to supply personal information. This information may include such details as the user's name, address and other contact details, financial information and in many cases personal preference information, such a user's likes and dislikes. This information may be used by a company or other organisation providing a service to identify a user, personalise the service offered to that user and charge the user for the service if required.
When a user wishes to access several different services, it has often been necessary to supply personal information to each individual service. This requires the user to supply the same data several times, and may lead to problems in updating all copies of information when required. To overcome these difficulties, it is known to provide remote profile systems, which store remote profile databases holding the user information described above. This information is then made available to other appropriately validated and authorised systems or services, so that a user does not have to repeatedly supply the same information or provide appropriate authorisation to different services during a single session. Such remote profile systems are, for example, AOL MagicCarpet, Microsoft Passport or the proposed Liberty Alliance system.
A source of concern is actually that the personal information stored on a remote profile database is vulnerable to unauthorised, or even perhaps authorised but undesirable use, such as unauthorised access to the site, data mining techniques or other leaks of information.
An aim of the present invention is to provide a new or improved method of managing profile information.